Hi all,
great news from the library and preprint server world: The Open Archives
Initiative (OAI, http://www.openarchives.org/) has released its new Object
Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specification for describing aggregations of
Web resources. Such aggregations can for instance be different versions of a
paper on a preprint server, the issues of a journal, the chapters of a book,
a collection of photos on flickr, or a series of blog posts.
By providing a way to describe such aggregations, the new OAI-ORE
specifications aims at moving the library world closer to the Web and to
enable Web clients, such as the crawlers of search engines like Google or
Yahoo or generic Web data browsers like Tabulator or Marbles, to do smarter
things with metadata about publications.
The OAI-ORE specification is build on the Linked Data and Cool URIs
principles, meaning that all objects of interest are identified with HTTP
URIs, these URIs are dereferencable to RDF descriptions, and it is thus
possible to interlink data between different repositories. Metadata about
aggregations is represented using a mix of well known vocabularies such as
Dublin Core or FOAF.
For more information about OAI-ORE please refer to:
1. ORE User Guide http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/primer
2. ORE Specifications Table of Contents
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc
3. ORE Release Note
http://groups.google.com/group/oai-ore/browse_thread/thread/dccb1daef89fabf0
With its broad scope, the OAI-ORE specification clearly overlaps with
ongoing work around POWDER (http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/) and SIOC
(http://sioc-project.org/) and it will be interesting to see how things play
together.
The classic OAI metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH) is used by hundreds
of libraries and archives to exchange metadata about more than 9 billion
documents and books. I think it is very promising from the Web perspective
that OAI dropped OAI-PMH's point-to-point data exchange paradigm in favor
for the open Web architecture in OAI-ORE. I also think that the deployment
of OAI-ORE within the libraries community could develop into a major step
forward for the Semantic Web as it might extend the Semantic Web with
comprehensive data about another domain.
Cheers,
Chris